On 06/10/14 at 23:13 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote: > On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 11:26:25PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > >On 06/10/14 at 20:38 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote: > >> On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 12:38:31PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > >> >On 06/10/14 at 12:07 +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: > >> >> > >> >> Both 2008 and 2011 are more than a year ago, so I don't see any > >> >> justification for making this change and would like to see it reverted. > >> > > >> >There were other occurences of reimbursement requests coming very late > >> >recently. It seems that some people wait until the deadline to do > >> >such tasks. > >> > > >> >Also, I don't think that 3 months is unreasonable. My employer applies a > >> >two-week soft deadline, and a one month hard deadline for travel > >> >reimbursements. > >> > >> So that's a stupidly tight setup on their part, so what...? What > >> actual *problem* are you trying to solve in Debian by arbitrarily > >> reducing the limit for us? > > > >Given that we have no clear process to track reimbursement requests over > >time, late reimbursement requests often involve digging through email > >archives to understand their status. > > OK... How many such requests do we have to deal with? In those > situations, it may take a little time. Complain to the people doing it > when they're *too* late. But an arbitrary short cut-off is not > helpful. > > >I agree that improving the processes (using e.g. RT) would be better, > >but this hasn't happened yet. If you want to join the auditor@ team to > >make that happen, you're welcome. But I am already spending far more > >time than I would like on financial stuff. > > It's your call on how much time and effort you want to spend, of > course. I don't remember having to spend much time at all on > reimbursements as DPL, but you may have many more requests; I'll admit > I don't know the numbers. I don't keep numbers about such requests, but I think that there are several factors: - the number of sprints increased a lot since 2010, resulting in more sprint-related reimbursement processes. - our infrastructure grew quite a lot, and DSA is more professional and organized, resulting in more expenses. - the process seem to have changed quite a bit. Apparently, you were only approving the initial overall budget for sprints, but the per-person reimbursement requests were handled directly by the TO, with the DPL out of the loop (which also makes it hard to understand the status of old sprints when a reimbursement request comes up after 6 years). - people seem to have higher expectation regarding reimbursement delays, and tend to complain to me. All those changes are probably good, but the auditor/DPL side of things did not really scale up accordingly, and my attempts to improve that side by recruiting more volunteers have failed so far. (but hey, I got two volunteers during this discussion) > >Also, I really don't see why you feel that it's necessary to have the > >possibility to wait for a year before submitting a reimbursement > >request. > > See Phil's response, for one. Personally, for small-ish things I often > end up leaving them for a while until they bunch up enough to care > about the money. Why is 3 months suddenly too long for that? You're > changing something that doesn't need changing, AFAICS - that's why I'm > asking you to justify why the change is necessary. So, I've updated https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/Reimbursement to add the following: If it is much more convenient to you to submit your reimbursement request later than that, you can submit it no more than a year after the corresponding event, but you must inform leader@debian.org and auditor@debian.org of that delayed submission during the three-month period, with a rough estimate of the expense (+/- 10%). I think that this compromise addresses concerns on both sides: - we get a clear status about pending reimbursement requests (and their amount) after 3 months - we have the possibility to submit reimbursement requests later if needed Providing a rough estimate should not be a problem, given it is already required to get pre-approval. Lucas
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